Dr Kate Mason helps leaders find their voice — and use it to lead, influence, and connect with lasting impact.
5.00 of 5
Top rated!5 of 5
“Kate is a great role model of a communicator and a gifted facilitator. She creates beautiful spaces to try things out and to be vulnerable with each other quickly. I took away a lot that I could apply immediately to my own role.”
Vicki S
Jolt
Great communication is not a talent you are born with — it is a skill that can be learned, refined, and wielded with intention. Dr Kate Mason gives leaders the tools to do exactly that. Her keynotes are intellectually rigourous yet deeply practical, challenging yet warm, and consistently the kind that audiences talk about long after the room has cleared. Kate's singular gift is helping professionals at every level find their real voice — not a performed version of confidence, but the kind of grounded, connected communication that moves people and builds lasting trust.
Dr Kate Mason is one of the most sought-after executive communications speakers in the world — a world-champion debater, author, and trusted advisor to leaders at some of the world's most influential companies. With a career that spans global boardrooms, start-up garages, and lecture theatres, Kate has an uncommon gift for helping people find their voice and wield it with precision, warmth, and power.
A veteran of high-stakes Silicon Valley roles, Kate has spent years embedded at the heart of the global technology industry, working with elite leaders and teams across big tech, ambitious start-ups, and mission-driven non-profits. It was here, in the pressure cooker of innovation culture, that she refined a deeply human philosophy of communication: that power and likeability are not in opposition, but are, in fact, each other's most potent allies.
She combines deep expertise in behavioural communication with practical tools that leaders can apply immediately. Her approach is grounded, sharp, and attuned to the realities of modern workplaces — where how you communicate often determines whether you lead, or merely manage.
When you book Dr Kate Mason, you bring a speaker who is in a class of her own. She blends intellectual rigour with genuine warmth, leaving audiences feeling not only challenged and inspired, but genuinely seen. Her sessions are the rare kind that provoke real behavioural change — not just in the room, but long after people have left it.
Kate works closely with organisations to tailor every session to their specific goals, culture, and audience. Whether she is addressing a room of senior executives or energising an entire organisation, she delivers insights and tools that drive meaningful, lasting change.
Her sessions equip participants to:
Communicate with confidence, authenticity, and impact
Navigate high-stakes and difficult conversations with skill
Build cultures of trust that enable teams to move fast and perform well
Shed the habits — disclaimers, hedging, over-performing — that dim their presence and undermine their leadership
Dr Kate Mason specialises in executive communication, leadership presence, high-performance team communication, and the psychology of trust and confidence at work. Her keynotes span six signature topics, each designed to deliver both conceptual shift and practical tools:
How to be Powerfully Likeable and thrive in your organization
Unlocking the communication secrets of global high-performance teams
Kill your confidence and find your real voice: Frameworks that unlock authenticity and stop performance
Imposing Syndrome: Learn how to escape its claws and get what you deserve
Remember you are an animal: Why powerful communication comes from listening to our body
How to build a culture of trust — your most valuable communications asset
In 2017, Kate founded Hedgehog + Fox, her boutique executive communications consultancy, bringing Silicon Valley's sharpest thinking to leaders who are ready to communicate with greater impact, clarity, and authenticity. Today, she works with forward-thinking teams and leaders at companies and is trusted by Google, Netflix, Microsoft, McKinsey & Co, Octopus Energy, BHP, Docusign, Evinova and more, coaching them to navigate the complex realities of communicating at work.
Kate brings the same rigour and humanity to high-performing teams across pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, banking, legal, professional services, and energy — any sector where leadership communication is the difference between good and great.
Kate's book, Powerfully Likeable: An Effective Guide for Women's Communication, published by Penguin Random House, has been heralded as a "game-changer" by Publishers Weekly. Kim Scott — author of the global phenomenon Radical Candor — calls it "a compelling, compassionate and funny read in which Mason shows you how to break free."
The book weaves together actionable, pragmatic wisdom alongside humour and sharp anecdotes, making it a readable instant classic. It is, in short, the book that ambitious professionals have been waiting for — and the intellectual foundation underpinning everything Kate brings to the stage.
At the heart of Dr Kate Mason's work is a clear and urgent mission: to help people communicate in ways that are honest, powerful, and genuinely human. She does not offer quick fixes or performance tricks. She offers a new way of thinking about what it means to lead with your voice — and the tools to make it real.
Booking Dr Kate Mason means investing in communication that changes how people lead, how teams work, and how organisations grow. Her audiences do not just leave informed — they leave transformed.
5 of 5
“Kate is a great role model of a communicator and a gifted facilitator. She creates beautiful spaces to try things out and to be vulnerable with each other quickly. I took away a lot that I could apply immediately to my own role.”
Vicki S Jolt
5 of 5
“This was one of the most genuinely valuable investments I’ve made in my personal career development in a long time.”
Sara B Blue Origin
5 of 5
“The talk was awesome and you have been a pleasure to work with. This resonated so well with our whole team.”
Tahje W Ultragenyx
5 of 5
“…the session landed so well! Early feedback has been universally positive, people loved the practical tips and enjoyed your warm, open style and how you made it feel like a conversation. We are very happy!”
Dawn P Evinova
5 of 5
“Thank you so much for your keynote. It was practical, honest and grounded in real experience. I loved it and found it so energizing and incredibly resonant.”
Jane M Optus
5 of 5
“I was, honestly, surprised that what you shared actually helped me right away. I have gone through many similar trainings and I got so much out of this one. Thank you.”
Audrey C Microsoft
5 of 5
“It’s six months later, and I am still getting such great feedback about your talk. Your work is amazing and I feel so grateful we were able to have you come visit.”
Laura M Ghirardelli Chocolate Company
Keynote by Dr. Kate Mason:
Drawing on her bestselling book of the same name, Dr Kate Mason lays out a new way to communicate with trust and calm.
Drawing on stories of coaching clients and her own experiences, she demonstrates how execs can retain what makes them unique-whether that be warmth, humor, or competitiveness, and gain and wield their power, too.
From personal presentation style to handling adversarial conversations and becoming your own best advocate, Mason invites a new generation of leaders to redefine the narrative around their presence and to embark on a journey of self-discovery and success on their own terms.
From a billboard in Times Square right to the heart of your organization, Powerfully Likeable is the clarion call across cubicles you’ve been waiting for to educate and energize your teams.
Keynote by Dr. Kate Mason:
In a world where a nod, silence, and a "looks fine" can mean three entirely different things depending on who's in the room, it’s never been harder to get high-performing, fast-moving teams on the same page without losing trust, speed, cohesion or all three.
Drawing on deep experience working with high-performance teams, Dr Kate Mason unpacks the most effective and powerful communication moves that the world's most effective teams have in common.
Mason draws an engaging and unique parallel from corporate teams to diasporic filmmaking crews which coalesce and disband regularly to deliver high-stakes, high-scrutiny projects on tight timelines.
Compelling, actionable and fast-paced, this conversation leaves an audience motivated to experiment, change and double down on their communications with their managers, peers and teams.
Keynote by Dr. Kate Mason:
Confidence is one of the most talked-about and least understood concepts in professional life. We chase it, perform it, and lie awake worrying it will abandon us at the worst possible moment.
In short, we overinvest in the very thing that’s causing us significant stress in meetings and presentations every day.
Dr Kate Mason proposes something more radical: that the pursuit of confidence itself might be the very thing getting in the way of our success. Confidence – rather than connecting us with our teams and peers – only makes us more distant, self-conscious and tentative than we were before.
Mason offers new frameworks to encourage real, genuinely close communication which also have the benefit of being enabling us to be more true to our selves, and therefore less performative and forced. Killing your confidence is, in fact, the most confident move you can make at work and beyond.
Keynote by Dr. Kate Mason:
Most of us have heard of imposter syndrome — but fewer of us have reckoned with its quieter, more insidious cousin: the habit of deliberately making ourselves smaller, softer, and easier to overlook when making an ask.
What Dr Kate Mason calls Imposing Syndrome is when we fear making an imposition (on time, resources or more), and instead use disclaimers, caveats and more, which reinforce that our asks and by extension, ourselves, aren’t worthy of attention.
This talk is an intervention. Through a frank, energising communications deep-dive, the audience will map exactly where they are thriving and where they are unconsciously dimming their own light — identifying the specific behaviors, habits, scripts and patterns that are dragging them down and how to avoid the traps forever.
Keynote by Dr. Kate Mason:
The most powerful communicators in any room aren't necessarily the loudest — they're the calmest.
This talk invites participants to reconnect with the most fundamental communication tool they have: their own body.
Rather than reaching for tired tricks like power poses, participants will discover what powerful communication actually feels like from the inside out, exploring practical, embodied strategies to access confidence in their voice, posture, and manner — and to sustain it even when the stakes are high.
Understanding communicative threat responses – and how to defang them – is an essential skill at work which empowers an audience to act with strong, connected rapport and to skillfully build trusted, strong work relationships.
Keynote by Dr. Kate Mason:
Trust is built into the way we talk and nowhere is this more visible than after a crisis or working with cross-cultural teams with different preferences, habits, and customs.
Trust is created not from handshakes or slogans, but from our everyday micro-movements: the sentences we choose, the questions we ask, the recaps we send.
Communication is itself built on trust and it is the engine and visibility layer that can help teams run fast and thrive or hinder the very same.
This keynote delves into seven ways to conceptualize trust in your teams and how to communicate it effectively so everyone can be on the same page, quickly and seamlessly.
Watch Dr. Kate Mason in action
